Her voice was thunder on the horizon. “Do as I tell you. If you press me right now, Warren, you are going to go for a swim. Now go link up that prophecy, and as soon as you find anything, you come tell me.”
Verna knew about the prophecies in the vaults. She knew that it could easily take years to link branches. It could take centuries. What choice was there?
He brushed dust from his robes, giving his eyes an excuse to look elsewhere. “As you wish, Prelate.”
As he turned to go, she could see that his eyes were red and puffy. She wanted to catch his arm and stop him, but he was already too far away. She wanted to call out to him and tell him that she wasn’t angry at him, that it wasn’t his fault that she was the false Prelate, but her voice failed her.
She found the round rock beneath the limb and sprang up the wall. Bothering with only two branches on the pear tree, she dropped to the ground inside the Prelate’s compound and, when she regained her feet, started running. Panting in hurt, she slapped her hand repeatedly against the door to the Prelate’s sanctuary, but it wouldn’t open. Remembering why, she dug in her pocket and found the ring. Inside, she pressed it against the sunburst on the door to close it, and then with all her anger and anguish, heaved the ring across the room, hearing it clatter against the walls and skitter across the floor.
Verna pried the journey book from the secret pouch sewn on the back of her belt and plopped down on the three-legged stool. Gasping for her breath, she fumbled the stylus from the spine of the little black book. She opened it, spreading it flat on the small table, and stared at the blank page.
She tried to think through the rage and resentment. She had to consider the possibility that she could be wrong. No. She wasn’t wrong. Still, she was a Sister of the Light, for what that was worth, and knew better than to risk everything on presumption. She had to think of a way to verify who had the other book, and she also had to do it in a way that wouldn’t betray her identity if she was wrong. But she wasn’t wrong. She knew who had it.
Verna kissed her ring finger as she whispered a prayer beseeching the Creator’s guidance, and asking, too, for strength.
She wanted to vent her wrath, but before all else, she had to make sure. With trembling fingers, she picked up the stylus and began to write.
You must first tell me the reason you chose me the last time. I remember every word. One mistake, and this journey book feeds the fire.
Verna closed the book and tucked it back into its secret pouch in her belt. Shaking, she pulled the comforter from its resting place atop the box bench and dragged it to the fat chair. Feeling more lonely than she had ever felt in her entire life, she curled up in the chair.
Verna remembered her last meeting with Prelate Annalina when Verna had returned with Richard after all those years. Annalina hadn’t wanted to see her, and it had taken weeks to finally be granted an audience. As long as she lived, no matter how many hundreds of years that might be, she would never forget that meeting, or the things the Prelate had told her.
Verna had been furious to discover the Prelate had withheld valuable information. The Prelate had used her and never told her the reasons. The Prelate had asked if Verna knew why she had been selected to go after Richard. Verna said she had thought it was a vote of confidence. The Prelate said it was because she suspected that Sisters Grace and Elizabeth, who had been on the journey with her and had been the first two to be selected, were Sisters of the Dark, and she had privileged information from prophecy that said the first two Sisters would die. The Prelate said she had used her prerogative to pick Verna as the third Sister to go.
Verna asked, “You chose me, because you had faith that I was not one of them?”
“I chose you, Verna,” the Prelate said, “because you were far down on the list, and because, all in all, you are quite unremarkable. I doubted you were one of them. You are a person of little note. I’m sure Grace and Elizabeth made their way to the top of the list because whoever directs the Sisters of the Dark considered them expendable. I direct the Sisters of the Light. I chose you for the same reason.
“There are Sisters who are valuable to our cause; I could not risk one of them on such a task. The boy may prove a value to us, but he is not as important as other matters at the palace. It was simply an opportunity I thought to take.
“If there had been trouble, and none of you made it back, well, I’m sure you can understand that a general would not want to lose his best troops on a low-priority mission.”
The woman who had smiled at her when she was little, filling her with inspiration, had broken her heart.
Verna drew the comforter up as she blinked at the watery walls of the sanctuary. All she had ever wanted was to be a Sister of the Light. She had wanted to be one of those wondrous women who used her gift to do the Creator’s work here in this world. She had given her life and her heart to the Palace of the Prophets.
Verna remembered the day they came and told her that her mother had died. Old age, they said.
Her mother didn’t have the gift, and so was of no use to the palace. Her mother didn’t live close, and Verna only rarely saw her. When her mother did travel to the palace for a visit, she was frightened because Verna didn’t age to her eyes, the way a normal person aged. She could never understand it, no matter how many times Verna tried to explain the spell. Verna knew it was because her mother feared to really listen. She feared magic.
Though the Sisters made no attempt to conceal the existence of the spell about the palace that slowed their aging, people without the gift had difficulty fathoming it. It was magic that had no meaning to their lives. The people were proud to live near the palace, near its splendor and might, and although they viewed the palace with reverence, that reverence was edged with fearful caution. They didn’t dare to focus their minds on things of such power, much the same way as they enjoyed the warmth of the sun, but didn’t dare to stare at it.
When her mother died, Verna had been at the palace for forty-seven years, yet appeared to have aged only to adolescence.
Verna remembered the day they came and told her that Leitis, her daughter, had died. Old age, they said.
Verna’s daughter, Jedidiah’s daughter, didn’t have the gift, and so was of no use to the palace. It would be better, they said, if she were raised by a family who would love her and give her a normal life; a life at the palace was no life for one without the gift. Verna had the Creator’s work to do, and so acquiesced.
Joining the gift of the male and the female created a better, though still remote, chance of the offspring being born with the gift. Thus Sisters and wizards could look forward to approval, if not official encouragement, should they conceive a child.
As per the arrangement the palace always made in such circumstances, Leitis didn’t know that the people who raised her weren’t her real parents. Verna guessed it was for the best. What kind of mother could a Sister of the Light be? The palace had provided for the family, to insure Verna wouldn’t worry for her daughter’s well-being.
Several times Verna had visited, as a Sister merely bringing the Creator’s blessing to a family of honest, hardworking people, and Leitis had seemed happy. The last time Verna had visited, Leitis had been gray and stooped, and was able to walk only with the aid of a cane. Leitis didn’t remember Verna as the same Sister who had visited when she was playing catch-the-fox with her young friends, sixty years before.
Leitis had smiled at Verna, at the blessing, and said, “Thank you, Sister. So talented, for one so young.”
“How are you, Leitis? Have you a good life?”
Verna’s daughter smiled distantly. “Oh, Sister, I’ve had a long and happy life. My husband died five years ago, but other than that, the Creator has blessed me.” She had chuckled. “I only wish I still had my curly brown hair. It was once as lovely as yours, yes it was—I swear it.”
Dear Creator, how long had it been since Leitis had passed on? It had to be fifty years. Leitis had had children, but Verna
had scrupulously avoided learning so much as their names.
The lump in her throat as she wept was nearly choking her.
She had given so much to be a Sister. She had just wanted to help people. She had never asked for anything.
And she had been played a fool.
She hadn’t wanted to be Prelate, but she was just beginning to think she could use the post to better the lives of people, to do the work for which she had sacrificed everything. Instead, she was again being played for a fool.
Verna clutched the comforter to herself as she cried in racking sobs until the light was long gone from the little windows in the peaks and her throat was raw.
In the heart of the night, she finally decided to go to her bed. She didn’t want to stay in the Prelate’s sanctuary; it only seemed to be mocking her. She was not the Prelate. She had finally exhausted all her tears, and felt only numb humiliation.
She couldn’t get the door to open, and had to crawl around on the floor until she found the Prelate’s ring. After she had closed the door, she put the ring back on her finger, a reminder, a beacon, of the dupe she was.
She shuffled woodenly into the Prelate’s office, on her way to the Prelate’s bed. The candle had guttered and gone out, so she lit another on the desk still stacked with waiting reports. Phoebe worked hard at seeing to it that it stayed that way. What was Phoebe going to think when she found out that she wasn’t really the Prelate’s administrator? That she had been appointed by a quite unremarkable Sister of little note?
Tomorrow, she would have to apologize to Warren. This wasn’t his fault. She shouldn’t take it out on him.
Just before she went through the door to the outer office, she stopped in her tracks.
Her diaphanous shield was shredded. She looked back at the desk. No new reports had been added to the piles.
Someone had been snooping around.
26
Sheets of rain raked the deck of the ship. The barefoot men crouched, tense and ready, their bulging muscles glistening in the faint yellow lamplight as they watched the distance close, and then, with a sudden burst of effort, they leapt into the darkness. After they landed, they sprang up to catch the lead-weighted fists at the ends of light heaving lines lofted across the murky chasm after them. Hand over hand, the men hauled across the heavy docking lines attached to the heaving lines.
Moving with swift efficiency, they looped the wrist-thick dock lines around the massive pilings, planted their feet, and bent their backs against the drag, using the pilings for purchase. Wet wood creaked and groaned as the lines took up the tension. The rows of men straining against the burden gave ground until they brought the slow but seemingly inexorable headway of the Lady Sefa to a halt. Grunting in unison, they began taking back the ground they had yielded, and the ship slowly drew toward the rain-slicked pier as men aboard dropped bundled rope fenders over the side to protect the hull.
Sister Ulicia, bunched together with Sisters Tovi, Cecilia, Armina, Nicci, and Merissa under a tarp drumming in the pelting rain, watched as Captain Blake paced the deck, angrily shouting orders at men running to see them carried out. He hadn’t wanted to bring the Lady Sefa into the narrow wharf in such weather, to say nothing of the dark, but instead to anchor in the harbor and bring the women ashore in the longboat. Ulicia was in no mood to be drenched as they were rowed a half mile to shore, and had summarily dismissed his pleas about having to launch all the boats to tow the ship in with the sweeps. One glare had cut off his reiteration of the dangers, and sent him tight-lipped to the task.
The captain snatched his sodden hat from his head as he stopped before them. “We’ll have you ashore shortly, ladies.”
“It didn’t appear as difficult as you made it out to be, Captain,” Ulicia said.
He wrung his hat. “We got her in. Though why you’d want to come way down the coast to Grafan Harbor is beyond me. Getting back to Tanimura over land from this forsaken army outpost is not going to be the ease it would have been had you let us take you straight there by sea.”
He left unsaid that it would have had them off his ship days sooner, which was undoubtedly the reason he had offered, with effusive graciousness, to take them straight back to Tanimura as they had originally wanted. Ulicia would have liked nothing better, but she had had no choice in the matter. She had done as she was ordered.
She peered up, beyond the wharf, to where she knew he waited. Her companions’ eyes, too, stared into the same darkness.
The hills overlooking the harbor were visible only in the crackling flashes of lightning, appearing suddenly out of the void, and except when the lightning sporadically revealed the lay of the high ground, the feeble glow of lights coming from the massive stone fortress hunkered high on a distant hill appeared to be floating in the inky sky. Only in the brief illumination could she see the bleak, rain-slicked, stone walls.
Jagang was there.
Being before him in the dream was one thing—she could eventually wake—but being before him in the flesh was quite another. There would be no waking, now. She clutched the link tighter to herself. For Jagang, there was going to be no waking, either. Her true Master would have him, and make him pay.
“Looks like you’re expected.”
Ulicia snatched herself from her thoughts and redirected her attention to the captain. “What?”
He pointed with his hat. “That coach must be for you ladies; there sure enough isn’t anyone else about but all those soldiers.”
Staring off into the gloom, she finally saw the black coach, with its team of six huge geldings, waiting on the road at the top of the wall above the wharf. Its door stood open. Ulicia had to remind herself to let the breath go from her lungs.
It would be over soon. Jagang would pay. They had only to see it through.
Once her eyes had recognized the still, dark shapes, she was able to begin picking out soldiers. They were everywhere. Fires dotted the closer hills all about the harbor, and she knew that for every fire that managed to burn in the pouring rain, there were twenty or thirty that wouldn’t catch flame. Without counting the fires she could see, she could easily tell there were hundreds.
The gangway rumbled across the deck as the sailors slid it out through the opening in the bulwark. With a dull thud, one end dropped on the dock. As soon as it touched down, sailors trotted down the plank with the Sisters’ baggage and headed up the pier toward the coach.
“It’s been a pleasure doing business with you, Sister,” Captain Blake lied. He fumbled with his hat as he waited for them to be on their way. He turned to the men on the lines. “Stand ready to slip the lines, lads! We don’t want to lose the tide!”
No cheer went up, but only because they feared the result were they to show their happiness to be rid of their passengers. On their sea voyage back to the Old World it had been necessary to measure out a few more lessons in discipline—lessons not one of them would ever forget.
As they waited silently for the order to cast off, none of the sailors so much as glanced at the six women. At the end of the gangway four men stood in readiness, eyes fixed on the ground, each gripping a pole supporting the corner of a canvas tarp to hold over the Sisters’ heads to keep them from being drenched.
With as much power as was crackling around Ulicia and her five companions, she could easily have used the Han to shield herself and her five Sisters from the rain, but she didn’t want to use the link until it was time; she didn’t want to take a chance by giving Jagang any warning. Besides, it pleased her to make these insignificant worms carry the tarp over their heads. They were all lucky she didn’t want to reveal the link, or she would have slaughtered the lot of them. Slowly.
As Ulicia started moving, she could feel each of her Sisters move, too. Each of them had not only the gift they were born with, the female Han, but each had been through the ritual, and each also possessed its opposite: the male Han they had appropriated from young wizards. Besides the Additive gift they were born with, each als
o possessed its opposite: Subtractive Magic.
And now it was all linked.
Ulicia had not been sure it would work; Sisters of the Dark, and beyond that Sisters of the Dark who had also succeeded in absorbing the male Han, had never before attempted to link their power. It had been a dangerous risk, but the alternative was unacceptable. That it worked had given them all a heady flush of relief. That it had worked beyond their wildest hopes left Ulicia intoxicated with the swift and violent flux of magic coursing through her.
She had never suspected such awesome power could be gathered. Short of the Creator or the Keeper, there was no power on the face of the earth that could approach what they now controlled.
Ulicia was the link’s dominant node, and the one who would command and direct the force. It was all she could do to contain the inner blaze of Han. Wherever her gaze settled, it howled to be released. Soon enough, it would be.
Linked as they were, the female and male Han, the Additive and Subtractive Magic, they had enough destructive force to make wizard’s fire seem a candle by comparison. With a mere thought, she could level the hill atop which sat the fortress. With a mere thought, she could instantly level everything in the range of her sight, and possibly beyond.
If she could be sure Jagang was in the fortress, she would have already unleashed the cataclysmic fury, but if he wasn’t, and they failed to find and kill him before they fell asleep again, then he would have them. First they must face him, to be sure he was there, and then she would release such power as had never been seen in this world, and turn Jagang to dust before he could blink. Her Master would have his soul, then, and see to it that Jagang’s punishment went on without end.
At the end of the gangway the four sailors moved around them, sheltering them from the rain. Ulicia could feel the muscles in each of her Sisters flex as they moved up the pier. Through the link, she could feel each little ache, or pain, or pleasure they felt. In her mind, they were one. In her mind, they were of one thought, one need: to rid themselves of this leech of a man.
Blood of the Fold Page 35